Comment by DantesKite
3 years ago
> No doubt the people who choose to stay in software are likely to be people who are curious, life-long learners
The article showed the opposite effect though. Curious, life-long learners stop working in software development because they have to constantly learn new skills and believe they can get more bang for their buck when they can invest in skills that don’t lose their value over time.
I once got excited about ExtJS, the way it created a desktop-like experience in the browser, and I said to myself, "I will learn this, all of it, I will become an expert. Tips and tricks, best practices, the works".
After six months of this, ExtJS 4 came out, which was essentially a totally new framework. Everything I learned was not only not applicable, it had to be actively unlearned.
The lesson here is: become good and proficient at something, but don't focus on becoming a ninja in one particular transient tech. There is value in becoming a Jedi of Unix build-in tools, or more persistent technologies like Git, for example.
Also, this is a bigger problem in the Javascript echosystem, where the hype cycles are more intense than in, say, Python. I checked out my Flask project from seven years ago and it's ready to rock.
I get the thing about constant learning, but learning in this industry used to be cumulative. Now it's a hamster wheel. You are learning how to solve the same problems, in a different, presumably in a "new" way.
People seem to be spending more time coming up with catchy names for their projects than making sure this is all sustainable.
Yes, this is how I feel. I have no problem learning a new skill. I get discouraged when I learn a new skill and just when I start to get really comfortable and productive with it, it's suddenly "legacy" and some new thing is popular.
The only skills that have really stood the test of time for me are C, PHP, unix shell stuff, and SQL.